{"id":39977,"date":"2019-07-03T23:45:02","date_gmt":"2019-07-04T03:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/?p=39977"},"modified":"2019-07-02T16:05:39","modified_gmt":"2019-07-02T20:05:39","slug":"k-12-photo-education-and-visual-literacy-3-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/artandphoto\/photocritic\/2019\/07\/03\/k-12-photo-education-and-visual-literacy-3-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"K-12 Photo Education and Visual Literacy, 3 (2011)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ADColeman<\/a>[While preparing the recent posting of my 1971 <\/em>New York Times“Manifesto for Photography Education,”<\/a> I came across the text of my 2011 keynote address to the 43rd Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA)<\/a>, hosted by The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and held at Seaview, in Galloway, New Jersey, delivered on October 1, 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n

Because it expands on and reconsiders that 1971 position paper, I thought it should appear here as a follow-up. It incorporates passages from the earlier text, but goes well beyond it, as you’ll see.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Clarence<\/a>The term “visual literacy”<\/a> entered the lexicon in 1969, when John Debes (pronounced debs) published his book with that title. Debes, coordinator of visual learning at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, NY, also co-founded the IVLA that same year (with Clarence Williams of the University of Rochester). So there’s a certain symmetry in my addressing that organization 40 years after broaching this subject in relation to photo education.<\/em><\/p>\n

Part 3 appears below. Click here for Part 1<\/a>, and here for Part 2<\/a>. <\/em>\u2014 A.D.C.]<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

K-12 Photo Education and Visual Literacy: Some Backstory (3)
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

… Today, as in 1971, I consider photography literacy a core skill, from an educational standpoint. I believe that, in a world where lens-based images pervade almost all nations and cultures, photography literacy underpins both visual literacy and media literacy \u2014 indeed, that both of those disciplines achieve nothing deeply meaningful unless they imbue their students with that skill set. Photography literacy is as necessary to full citizenly participation in the 21st-century global environment as is word-based literacy, the ability to read and write.<\/p>\n

\"New<\/a>And photography literacy does not simply mean the ability to look at a photograph and verbalize or write down the names of whatever the photographer has elected to show that the viewer can identify, nor the ability to imagine any old story and impose it on a photographic work, nor even the ability to follow a multi-image visual storyline like a pig after truffles.<\/p>\n

It involves the ability to hear the voice and tone and motive (not to mention motif) of a photographic work, to distinguish reportage from fiction and fiction from lying, to identify and understand the function of framing, selective depth of field, foreground\/background relationships, to recognize the effects of different lenses, apertures, shutter speeds \u2014 to understand and assess the sum of all those decisions, deliberated and intuitive, that transform the raw contents of a given photographic image or image sequence into its content, and that thereby constitute the distinction between what an image is of and what it’s about. And then to argue with said photographic work as if one took seriously the late Richard Avedon’s proposition that “The moment an emotion or fact is \u2028transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an\u2028 opinion.”<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

In my opinion, with which you’re welcome to argue, it’s easier to teach these matters using images that have no direct personal connection to the students, because those images don’t come loaded with the personal baggage that embeds itself automatically in the images and texts they produce themselves, so students feel no protective impulse to defend or justify them. Even for an adult, as I can testify from long experience, achieving critical distance from one’s own photographs, essays, poems, and other creations constitutes a challenge. It’s not something I’d expect to come readily from a child. Critical thinking \u2014 a capacity I assume we here consider vital \u2014 requires critical distance as its premise. If we can help young people to build a critical relationship to news photographs, celebrity photographs, documentary photographs, vernacular photographs, they’ll evolve a critical response to their own work in due time. And they’ll recognize the strategies of suasion commonly employed in public communication via the photographic image.<\/p>\n

I consider that no less “empowering” than getting the young to generate their own images. Teaching people how to make informed, discriminating decisions when they follow political campaigns and enter the voting booth isn’t less “empowering” than teaching them how to run for office themselves. These are different arenas of empowerment, different skill sets. As members of the electorate, we need a certain kind of political savvy every day; campaign know-how becomes essential when we decide to throw our own hats into the ring.<\/p>\n

\"John<\/a>

John Whiting, Photography Is A Language (1946), cover<\/p><\/div>\n

Teaching young people how to interpret photographs isn’t much different in kind from teaching kids about first- and second- and third-person narrators, expository passages versus dialogue, journalism versus poetry, as we do with textual material. Or point of view, close-ups versus establishing shots versus tracking shots, flashbacks, and such, when we help them grasp the rudiments of filmic communication. Children come to understand these devices early on as readers, and as viewers of movies and TV shows; no reason to think they can’t get a handle on the basic language of the still photograph.<\/p>\n

And it is a language, not in the vaporous metaphoric sense but literally, a true language with its syntax and grammar and vocabulary and tropes. Those same structural elements have necessarily embedded themselves in the lens-based systems that arose after the invention of still photography, film and video, and now multimedia. They’ll prove relevant in the emergent “3-D everywhere” environment. They’re mimicked in animated movies, video games, comics, and other visual entertainments. An awareness of how they shape and even determine the countless visual messages we receive isn’t simply important, it’s requisite.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

The still image can serve as the ideal vehicle for initiating that awareness precisely because it’s static, enabling its close study without the distraction of kinetic flicker or the necessity of interruptive freeze-framing. It doesn’t change continuously before your very eyes. It asks for contemplative response, and rewards it. In today’s hyperactive media environment, that in itself is a good thing.<\/p>\n

To forestall the argument that the still photograph has become little more than an obsolescing historical artifact, I remind you that<\/p>\n